But the passage of these notes had aroused notice; all who were in the secret (or supposed themselves to be so) were whispering information—the rest questions; and the minister himself seemed quite discountenanced by the flutter in the church and sudden stir and whispering. His voice changed, he plainly faltered, nor did he again recover the easy conviction and full tones of his delivery. It would be a puzzle to him till his dying day, why a sermon that had gone with triumph through four parts, should thus miscarry in the fifth. As for me, I continued to sit there, very wet and weary, and a good deal anxious as to what should happen next, but greatly exulting in my success. CHAPTER XVII. THE MEMORIAL The last word of the blessing was scarce out of the minister’s mouth before Stewart had me by the arm. We were the first to be forth of the church, and he made such extraordinary expedition that we were safe within the four walls of a house before the street had begun to be thronged with the home-going congregation. “Am I yet in time?” I asked. “Ay and no,” said he. “The case is over; the jury is enclosed, and will so kind as let us ken their view of it to-morrow in the morning, the same as I could have told it my own self three days ago before the play began. The thing has been public from the start. The panel kent it, ‘_Ye may do what ye will for me_,’ whispers he two days ago. ‘_Ye ken my fate by what the Duke of Argyle has just said to Mr. Macintosh_.’ O, it’s been a scandal! “The great Agyle he gaed before, He gart the cannons and guns to roar,” and the very macer cried ‘Cruachan!’ But now that I have got you again I’ll never despair. The oak shall go over the myrtle yet; we’ll ding the Campbells yet in their own town. Praise God that I should see the day!” He was leaping with excitement, emptied out his mails upon the floor that I might have a change of clothes, and incommoded me with his assistance as I changed. What remained to be done, or how I was to do it, was what he never told me nor, I believe, so much as thought of. “We’ll ding the Campbells yet!” that was still his overcome. And it was forced home upon my mind how this, that had the externals of a sober process of law, was in its essence a clan battle between savage clans. I thought my friend the Writer none of the least savage. Who that had only seen him at a counsel’s back before the Lord Ordinary or following a golf ball and laying down his clubs on Bruntsfield links, could have recognised for the same person this voluble and violent clansman?